Author of The Indian Great Awakening to Speak at the Connecticut State Library Wednesday, March 6, 2013

CONNECTICUT STATE LIBRARY “3rd THURSDAY OF THE MONTH”BROWN BAG LUNCH SERIES

Dr. Linford Fisher, Assistant Professor of History at Brown University, will be at the Connecticut State Library, on Thursday, March 21, 2013 from Noon to 12:45 to discuss his new book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. Using a variety of court documents, land deeds, letters, material culture, and church records, he traces the selective adoption of Christian ideas and practices by Native individuals prior to and during the Great Awakening, and the subsequent emergence, post-awakening, of a distinct Indian separatism and partial rejection of Anglo-American religious institutions in response to growing proto-racism. Dr. Fisher provides a new framework for understanding religious conversion and he brings together Native history that is not often considered together: religion, land, use of court system, and local intra-tribal politics. He argues that the Great Awakening was not as formative in the lives of Natives (or as widely embraced) as previously assumed. Dr. Fisher did considerable research at the State Library. Fisher’s talk is part of the State Library and Museum of Connecticut History’s Third Thursday Brownbag Lunchtime speaker series which features a variety of speakers on various aspects of Connecticut history. All programs are free and open tot he public.

About the Speaker: Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Dr. Fisher received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008. His first book, was an in-depth study of long term cultural and religious change among American Indians in eighteenth-century Rhode Island, and Long Island, N.Y. Dr. Fisher has published essays in Ethnohistory, the New England Quarterly, and Harvard Theological Review, and has received fellowships from Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Soceity, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Philosophical Society, Brown University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Fisher’s current book project is a study of indentured servitude and slavery among the African and Indian populations of colonial New England and the Atlantic world.

About the State Library: The Connecticut State Library is an Executive Branch agency of the State of Connecticut. The State Library provides a variety of library, information, archival, public records, museum and administrative services to the citizens of Connecticut, as well as employees and officials of all three branches of government. Visit the State Library at http://www.ctstatelibrary.org